News

What Would Your Emoji Password Be?

by Melissah Yang

June 16, 2015

Whether you love them or not, emojis have replaced large chunks of the written language, and now they could soon become the very key to protecting your bank accounts. According to one UK company, emoji passwords are coming to online banking very soon. Lucky for you, we've created some examples of emoji passwords to help you figure out what mini-story will keep your money right where it should be.

The company behind the brilliant idea is Intelligent Environments, which promises that an emoji passcode is safer than existing PIN numbers because the total number of combinations is dramatically higher if you go the emoji route. If you have a database of 44 emojis, you can create 3.5 million permutations of four non-repeating emojis. You can only create 7,290 permutations of four non-repeating numbers using 0 through 9.

The company announced its product via a launch video, which even has memory expert and Mind Mapping inventor Tony Buzan giving his perspective on why images are a lot easier to store in our brain than numbers.

Forgetting passwords is because the brain doesn't work digitally or verbally. It works imagistically. ... Images are the prime way of remembering anything you want to remember. ... You help build a story and the brain loves stories, so you remember it. You love it.

The company appears to be focusing on bank accounts right now, but it definitely gets you thinking about how much fun you could have creating an emoji password for everything, from your email to your to your Facebook. Just imagine how many fun four-emoji combos you can create to keep hackers at away. And if you needed some inspiration on what you exactly you can do with four emojis: